The biggest and meanest joke here is that, unless you’re bleeding your last or minutes from death, for-profit ERs won’t admit you. In Chicago, people have died in transit after being turned down by a for-profit ER and sent to Cook County Hospital, now the only public hospital left in the city. It’s not much better if you actually make it to the ER at Cook County — you’re guaranteed at least a 4-hour wait, and then an overworked, sleep-deprived intern will see you. As happened with an uninsured friend of mine who had walking pneumonia, the intern told him he probabaly had the flu and to go home, take Tylenol, and come back in a few days if he didn’t feel better. He didn’t feel better, and he wasn’t about to go back and sit up in a plastic chair for 6 hours waitng to be seen, as he ahd the first time, so he ended up borrowing the money from a neighbor to go to a doctor and get a prescription for antibiotics. The for-profit doctor wanted him to go to the hospital, until he was told he had no insurance. Then it was ‘fill the prescription and take all the pills. Thanks, bye!’
I can only imagine how bad it is in rural areas where public hospitals are hundreds of miles away.
It’s just a good thing we have the ‘best health care system in the world’ where people don’t have to wait in line for treatment as they do in socialist Canada. Just think, if it wasn’t the best, there would be skeletons sprouting in the Cook County ER waiting room. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
The biggest and meanest joke here is that, unless you’re bleeding your last or minutes from death, for-profit ERs won’t admit you. In Chicago, people have died in transit after being turned down by a for-profit ER and sent to Cook County Hospital, now the only public hospital left in the city. It’s not much better if you actually make it to the ER at Cook County — you’re guaranteed at least a 4-hour wait, and then an overworked, sleep-deprived intern will see you. As happened with an uninsured friend of mine who had walking pneumonia, the intern told him he probabaly had the flu and to go home, take Tylenol, and come back in a few days if he didn’t feel better. He didn’t feel better, and he wasn’t about to go back and sit up in a plastic chair for 6 hours waitng to be seen, as he ahd the first time, so he ended up borrowing the money from a neighbor to go to a doctor and get a prescription for antibiotics. The for-profit doctor wanted him to go to the hospital, until he was told he had no insurance. Then it was ‘fill the prescription and take all the pills. Thanks, bye!’
I can only imagine how bad it is in rural areas where public hospitals are hundreds of miles away.
It’s just a good thing we have the ‘best health care system in the world’ where people don’t have to wait in line for treatment as they do in socialist Canada. Just think, if it wasn’t the best, there would be skeletons sprouting in the Cook County ER waiting room. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Comment by RS Janes — August 27, 2009 @ 4:01 pm